None

Financial penalty

Enforcement notice, no fine

21 March 2024

Date on the register

UK GDPR

Law relied on

DPA 2018 section 3

Central government

Sector

14 actions on the register

In one line

The ICO issued Home Office with a enforcement notice on 21 March 2024 under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. No financial penalty attaches to it.

01The record

Organisation named: Home Office
Action: Enforcement notice
Date published: 21 March 2024
Register year: 2024
Law relied on: UK GDPR
Provisions cited: DPA 2018 section 3
Penalty: None (not a financial penalty)
Sector on the register: Central government
ICO register reference: 17349
Register status: Published on the ICO enforcement register, 4 September 2026
Notice documents: 2 PDFs published by the ICO
Sector share of register: 14 of 216 actions (6%)
Actions published that year: 52
Actions under this law: 95
Position on the register: 137th of 216, oldest first
Published the same day: This entry alone

02What happened, and where it sits

Home Office received an ICO enforcement notice on 21 March 2024. The Commissioner acted under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, citing DPA 2018 section 3. An order to act. An enforcement notice requires the organisation to take, or stop taking, specified steps by a deadline, and failure to comply is itself an offence.

No sum is attached to this action. Enforcement notices are corrective, not financial, which is why Home Office appears on the register without a figure beside it.

Home Office is filed under Central government, which accounts for 14 of the 216 actions on the register (6%). In 2024 the ICO published 52 enforcement actions in total, 17 of them enforcement notices. 95 actions on the register name UK GDPR.

Counted from the oldest entry forward, this is the 137th of 216 actions on the register and the 12th of 14 in Central government. The ICO publishes 2 documents for this action, 709 KB in total: "Home office enforcement notice" and "Home Office warning". They are the authority for everything on this page.

03The ICO's own account

An enforcement notice and a warning have been issued to the Home Office for failing to assess the privacy risks posed by the electronic monitoring of people arriving in the UK by unauthorised means. The ICO has been in discussion with the Home Office regarding its pilot to place ankle tags on, and track the GPS location of, up to 600 migrants who arrived in the UK and were on immigration bail. Although the pilot ended in December 2023, the Home Office has retained the GPS location data collected by the tags and will continue to be able to access and use that data including sharing it with other third-party organisations. The enforcement notice orders the Home Office to update its internal policies, access guidance and privacy information in relation to the data retained from the pilot. The warning issued also states that any future processing on the same basis will be in breach of data protection law and will attract enforcement action.

Quoted from the ICO's published register entry (ico.org.uk), Open Government Licence v3.0.

The law behind this action

UK GDPR

The UK GDPR is the data protection regime the ICO enforces against controllers and processors. Its upper tier is capped at £17.5 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

All 95 register actions under UK GDPR

What a enforcement notice does

An order to act. An enforcement notice requires the organisation to take, or stop taking, specified steps by a deadline, and failure to comply is itself an offence.

Published notice

PDFHome office enforcement notice(468 KB)
PDFHome Office warning(241 KB)

04Nearest entries on the register

Closest by sector, law and date
Organisation	Date	Action	Law	Penalty	Sector
Executive Office	21 Jul 2023	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Department for Education	2 Nov 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Department for Work and Pensions	31 Oct 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Secretary of State for the Home Department (Home Office)	16 Aug 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Department of Health and Social Care	11 Jul 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government

All Central government actions/All 2024 actions/The full register

05Work out an exposure of your own

Article 83 fine calculator

Estimate upper and lower tier exposure from turnover and infringement type, on the same scale the ICO works to.

How a fine is calculated

The Article 83(2) factors, the turnover caps, and how a regulator gets from a contravention to a number.

The ICO profile

How the UK regulator works post-Brexit, the £17.5M and £8.7M UK GDPR caps, and its divergence from the EU regime.

Provenance and independence

Source: ICO enforcement register (ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/), as published on 4 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

GDPRFine.com is an independent tracker of ICO enforcement. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Information Commissioner's Office, and it uses no ICO branding. Where the ICO's own wording is reproduced it is quoted and attributed; everything else on these pages is our own summary of the published record.

The ICO's register held 222 entries on that date. 6 of them are prosecutions of named individuals, with ages and home towns in the ICO's own summary. This tracker indexes organisations, so those 6 are excluded and every count on these pages is out of 216. They remain on the ICO's own register.

An entry says what the Commissioner did on the date shown. It is not a statement about the organisation today, and the ICO can amend or remove a register entry at any time. Amounts and provisions are as published by the ICO; where the published notice does not state a figure or name a provision, these pages say so rather than filling the gap. This entry was read from the register page at https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2024/03/home-office/.